


Not quite the same

by Deviant_Accumulation



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Gen, Spoilers for Broken Homes, tw: discussion of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 16:46:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1148379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deviant_Accumulation/pseuds/Deviant_Accumulation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the h/c bingo. Not everyone celebrates the prospect of getting young again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not quite the same

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the lovely stars-ashes for beta-reading!

The sky above was dark and curiously bleak. No clouds hindered the view, but still the light from the slim crescent moon and the meagre few stars that shone brightly enough to be visible through the light pollution was not enough to illuminate the city in more than a hazy dim glow.

He remembered standing here and seeing a whole sea of stars, constellations, and the faint dust of the milky way, years ago – so, so many years ago – and then he chastised himself for dropping into melancholy so quickly.

 

Sitting on the balcony he could feel a faint breeze ruffling his hair and sneaking under the suit and shirt he was wearing, which was not nearly enough for this early in spring. He took another mouthful from the scotch glass in his right hand, the alcohol faintly burning in his throat but giving him a warm feeling in his chest.

 

Beside him, Peter shifted slightly, the – probably empty – beer can almost dropping from his loose grip. There was a warm line where their thighs and shoulders touched and Nightingale had to stop himself from pressing closer into the warmth. He wondered for a moment how long they had been sitting here. Quite long, judging by how empty his – second he thought – scotch glass was and the now discernible biting from the cold at the tip of his nose.

 

They had been sifting through Lesley’s possessions, something he had put off for longer than he should have but that needed to be done at some point, and needed to be done with the help of his remaining apprentice, who had known her much better than he did, and who had insisted on helping, even when Nightingale had made the (quite pathetic) attempt tooffer to do it alone. Half-way through Peter had said that he needed a drink if he was going to keep this up and Nightingale hadn’t had it in him to refuse.

 

He didn’t quite remember at what point the scotch had appeared, but their search had been fruitless in any case, so there wasn’t a good argument against fogging his mind with alcohol anymore.

 

They had looked around the balcony that was attached to Lesley’s room last, but hadn’t found any traces of anything suspicious, which was when they had given up on the task and just stayed there, Peter not looking forward going back to the room where everything that Lesley had left behind was strewn over the floor and Nightingale too tired to insist that they had to so eventually.

 

Since then they hadn’t really talked, just sat down on the wrought-iron bench. He had thought about trying to start a conversation, but felt that silence suited them much better in this situation, and that it wasn’t really his place to wring words out of his apprentice anyway. He would still like to know what Peter thought – they hadn’t really spoken about what happened in Skygarden aside from Peter giving him a brief statement of the things that were relevant to their jobs. He didn’t know if they were close enough for a heart-to-heart talk like that, and he also doubted that it was what Peter needed. It certainly wouldn’t have been what he would have preferred in a situation like this but, then again, his habits of coping with things verged very close to unhealthy.

Still, sitting silently on a cold balcony with someone else was definitely better than sitting silently on a cold balcony alone in terms of ‘healthy’ – it was all too easy to slip into the wrong mindset when one tried to deal with everything that weighed them down alone – something he was quite painfully familiar with.

 

Beside him Peter shifted again, straightening his back from his slumped pose and leaning against the back of the bench.

 

‘Might I ask a question?’

 

Nightingale half-turned in surprise when Peter spoke up, looking at his apprentice whose eyes were fixed to the skyline before them.

 

‘Of course,’ he said, not quite sure what to expect.

 

‘What did you do when you discovered that you were ageing backwards?’

 

There was a beat of silence and Peter turned his head to fix curious eyes on him when he didn’t answer.

 

‘You don’t have to answer, y’know,’ he added.

 

‘No, that’s not… I just didn’t expect that sort of question.’ He wasn’t even sure what he had expected. Something about Varvara or the Faceless Man maybe, what they were going to do now, but certainly not that sort of question. Then again, Peter did have the tendency to ask all sorts of questions that he didn’t always expect.Peter shrugged.

 

‘I’ve just been thinking about what Varvara said. And wondered…’

 

‘If I went out and had wild sex?’ Nightingale finished.

 

To Peter’s credit, he didn’t bat an eye. ‘For example.’

 

Nightingale laughed at that. ‘I have to disappoint you there’ he said, feeling the alcohol loosening his tongue and not really minding. ‘I didn’t even really realise what was happening for a while. As you might expect, I felt better, healthier, but I didn’t think that much of it at first. It took me a couple years to notice that instead of gaining wrinkles I was, in fact, losing them. And even then I couldn’t quite grasp what was happening, until one Sunday afternoon it just sort of came over me that it was pretty much the only explanation for it.’

 

‘And then wild sex?’

 

Nightingale chuckled, but the mirth soon enough disappeared.

 

‘Not quite’ he murmured, turning the half-empty scotch glass in his hands.

 

‘What, then?’

 

He glanced up to see Peter eyeing him, his expression nearly unreadable in the dim light.

He should evade, push from the buzz in his head and stop there, but instead he doesn’t think and answers.

 

 ‘I tried to commit suicide.’

 

If there was a visible reaction of Peter’s face he didn’t see it, his eyes focused on the amber liquid inside his glass, sloshing the scotch around and watching it move.

 

‘Why?’ Peter finally asks.

 

Nightingale shrugs. ‘A variety of reasons, I suppose. It caused me to look into the past, to remember…’ Ettersberg and lines of corpses ‘… _things_. A huge part of it was probably just – as you might put it – a big fuck you.’ He still remembered the anger. ‘I felt that I had already pretty much lived my life, and now I was supposed to breathe for what seemed to be another life-time? I just felt tired of it. Of everything. I wanted peace. Most of the magic was gone and it had been years since the last magical incident so, really, what was the purpose of carrying on? But most of all… it just didn’t seem fair. To… to everyone who didn’t even get one proper life span.’

 

His fingers tap against the scotch glass, prickling with the faint memory of the cold steel from the gun, gripping it tight enough to leave marks in his skin when he finally let go.

He could feel Peter’s eyes on him but didn’t dare to look.

 

There was a rustle of fabric and then Peter was leaning against him, not quite a hug – they were still British, after all – but it still felt like one. He hesitated for a moment but then leant in too.

 

‘Sorry for asking,’ Peter mumbled after a while.

 

‘Don’t be’ he responded. He needn’t have answered, after all. He’d probably regret answering in the morning, too, but for now he just couldn’t care less. ‘It’s in the past, anyway. I didn’t follow through with it, after all. I suppose I clung too much to life in the end. And I definitely couldn’t leave Molly alone like that. And then the magic started to come back after all, and a few years later I met Abdul and… well, here we are now.’

 

And, despite everything that was happening, _here_ was fine for now.


End file.
